Sartre gives an example in Being and Nothingness of a man with a terrible gambling problem. The man goes to a casino every day and spends most of his income gambling, which causes great damage to his own well-being and that of his families. The gambler wakes up one day and sincerely resolves to never gamble again, acknowledging that it does so much damage to both himself and his family, however upon passing a row of buildings turns to find the casino, and is tempted to gamble again, and inevitably gives up and heads straight into the casino to gamble another day.
The question that Sartre raises here in this example, is how can a man be truly free if he can simultaneously acknowledge that it is damaging himself and his family, and that he should stop doing it, and sincerely want to stop, but give into that temptation again in the same vein? It sounds quite 1984-ish, but the issue comes not from any government manipulation but from the foundations of what a person truly is.
Here-in lies the heart of Sartre’s thoroughly confusing statement “We are what we are not, and we are not what we are”. This is to say that the man is always able to make himself anew, and that nothing that precedes him determines who or what he is, however, that man of yesterday who gambled his money away is still him, in the sense that he can recognise himself within that man, despite having been a changed man in his belief that he should stop. The difficulty though is that while the man is free to either continue gambling or to stop for the sake of his family, there is an added difficulty in pushing forward. For the man to renew his choice in gambling, he only has to continue to do waht is already done, to continue to be the man he was yesterday. To give it up is to face that nothingness that surfaces between what we are and what we are not, because for Sartre, that nothingness is what we truly are, we are this blank void that we fill with life, and for the man to become who he wants to be, he has to shake off the man of yesterday and become the man of tomorrow.
Unfortunately though, he is not yet the man of tomorrow, nor is he the man of yesterday, he is the nothingness between the two, who is faced with the choice, and when faced with that choice we are also faced with the angst that comes with realizing that we are responsible for all of this, gamble or not gamble. He has to fill the void, he has to become something, but becoming the man of tomorrow means jumping that void, crossing between the easy choice of staying who he was and not facing that horror of choice, or taking that leap and pushing into unknown territory and making what he believes the right decision to be.
So in some sense, the man can still sincerely believe he needs to change and not do so out of fear, and of choosing to follow that past self, and to keep the future self at a distance, in fear of that angst that follows the burden of our choosing. But the most important message of the example is that it is contradictory to hold those two positions, and that it only makes sense if we see ourselves not as the past or the future, or the present, or any of these things, but as the nothingness that underlines all of those things. When we look to ourselves we see only specifics, but we truly see ourselves and the nothingness that we are when we’re faced with the freedom to choose.
So the thing that ‘holds him back’ so to speak, at being who he wants is the very thing that he is, free.
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